I think though we are at a moment in which the narrative by which capitalism is the only game in town is really breaking down and that's why people like a Barack Obama that generation especially is so steadfast attached to protecting it but they realize that words are not anymore weighty enough to defend the system that's why you to strike concretely with austerity policies so in the capital order I discuss how austerity is both about consensus bill.

So again having us all think that you know workers are lazy that those at the top really deserve it and so it's fair for resources to be shifted towards those who are actually the engine of the economic machine those virtuous individuals.

Well of course this is the complete opposite of another theoretical framework that will tell you that actually capitalist economic growth derives from structural exploitation and it's actually the workers that produce value and so they are at the center of the machine.

But if this narrative consensus building isn't anymore working and I think the newer generations are more and more skeptical what we see today is clearly that our system is in a crisis that is quite existential in terms of its appeal to the new generations.

At this point though you need the coercion thing so austerity plays with this double strategy consensus coercion and coercion comes in the form of increase of interest rates increases of interest rates will work as a disciplinary mechanism because people will be forced out of their jobs.

Unemployment will create greater competition amongst workers will then have to accept lower wages and in general have to accept to go to work for a wage and the same happens with you know if you cut social expenditures you're increasing the dependence on the market of people because while before maybe they could be entitled to health care or decent schooling just by the fact of being alive as citizens in the United States we well know that this is not the case at all because everything is commodified that's you need money in order to.

Purchase any basic service and this is why you have to give in and accept to be subjugated to the capital order but clearly this generation of people is aware and worried and that's why they dismiss any talk of alternatives I want to talk the other day I was labeled as a romantic Marxist and I told them why do you give labels to people just things lightly outside the box you know I don't go around labeling everyone as the technocratic liberal.

That's kind of you know we should right but I do think that this fact that they're so protective and they're so dismissive about alternatives speaks to a generalized crisis of their worldview that they are aware of and this is why the Fed is not stopping with increases interest rates why Republicans have already said that they're going to curtail Medicaid and Medicare and so on and so forth.

Well what's kind of crazy to me to be honest is how they get away with it I mean like in the context of these interest rates he's you have the usual characters the Larry summers of the world just openly saying we have to bring wages down it's going to hurt we're going to raise unemployment this is the goal right simultaneously you still have the political leadership bragging about historically low unemployment rates etc at the same time that you know they're kind of actively angling.

To revert to the status quo and you have obviously more or less a democracy whereas we just saw admit turns people have the opportunity to go to the polls and vote for different kinds of policies and different kind of political systems and it strikes me as very curious how at least from an American perspective people have been so indoctrinated into the mythology that these kind of economic interventions are both necessary and we're going to be able to do that.

So that's not necessary and that they are the exclusive intervention that could ever be applied because there's this view of the economy and economics as almost like a natural law like you throw a ball up in the air and it's going to come back to the ground is just gravity we got to deal with what it is.

And I wondered if you can talk a little bit about the history and the evolution of those economic theories and how they became so normal so naturalized that they're really even interrogated in the mainstream.

This is super important I think this is what I teach my students and in general I think it would be great if everyone knew where these economic theories come from and what they stand for the authority of the expert as the objective scientist who has the neutral truth in their hands is something that was actually constructed by the elite economists that run our societies today and it was something that required I think a hundred years.

To be undisputed as it at the present economists are embedded in the class struggle they participate in the class struggle and they actually have quite a key role in convincing people that is what is beneficial for the minority for the very few the one percent is actually something that is beneficial to all and this is imbued in their models and again it's important to note that there is not just one economic theory.

We live in a society that has been shaped for the last 100 years by what is called the neoclassical framework that was born at the end of the 1800s so this neoclassical framework is a framework that emerged exactly to expel all the political from a framework.

If you'd like to hear more remember you can subscribe at patreon.com slash bad faith podcast for $5 a month to get our full back catalog of episodes with some sweet sweet stuff.

Keep the faith.